Call of the Wild

A Colorado garden shaped by the harsh hand of nature

text and photography by LAUREN SPRINGER

LIKE MANY TRANSPLANTS to the Rocky Mountain West, I came for the region’s natural beauty. In 1995, after six years in an unremarkable small plains town north of Denver, I had the privilege of moving to 115 acres of pristine foothills land west of Fort Collins. It was more stunning a place than I had ever imagined living in, but gardening there was far from ideal. With a short three-and-a-half-month frost-free season and low temperatures placing it squarely in USDA Zone 4b, the cruel facts were undeniable. Add to this incessant wind, inconsistent winter snowcover, with some of the heaviest snows coming as late as May and as early as September, and clearly I was in for a challenge.

It wasn’t all bad news, though. The land was quite steep—a desirable change for me—with spectacular views of the first row of foothills and a red sandstone canyon. There was actually more topsoil than typical for the area: between four and nine inches before hitting subsoil and bedrock. The soil itself was a seemingly intractable alkaline clay that became an ally during drought, holding what little moisture was available and growing the plants tight and tough. Large rounded granite glacial boulders abounded on the site, along with ponderosa pines, Rocky Mountain junipers, and well over 150 species of gardenworthy native shrubs, perennials, bulbs, succulents, grasses, and sedges. At 6,200 feet in elevation, with primarily southern and eastern exposures, an overlap of shortgrass prairie, foothills chaparral, and montane flora and fauna made for an uncharacteristically biodiverse spot.

I was truly blessed, because I have always gardened to be closer to nature. My joy comes from re-creating a bit of wildness in a heightened, exaggerated form. This allows me to experience the land’s natural rhythms, seasonal events and changes, as well as to enjoy plants in associations that mirror the beauty of their native haunts.

SETBACKS

My initial optimism was soon dampened by an overwhelming sense of awe for the beauty of what was already there. How could I ever create anything remotely as perfect? And how could I make my work fit in and look a part of the greater garden of Eden that lay all around me? Were it not for the immediacy of the scarred acre around the house caused by the building process, I might have remained immobilized. But erosion, encroaching weeds, and blowing dust all called me to arms. I had to plant something to heal the wounds. This one acre became a seven-year experiment from which I learned more about the joys and limitations of gardening in and with nature than I may ever be able to do again.

There were also practical obstacles. Before the first plant went in or the first stone was laid, I had hooved animals of all sorts to contend with. A resident herd of mule deer, the canyon’s seasonal cattle, and our own horses were all incompatible with plant life of the gardenesque sort. We put up a seven-and-a-half-foot tall New Zealand high-tension livestock fence, enclosing a bit over the acre I planned to garden around the house. Aside from keeping the larger herbivores at bay, it also provided security for children and pets after a serious wildfire, when bears and mountain lions came down close to our home in search of food.

CREATING SPACES

As with any private garden, how one experiences the spaces around the house determines how the garden should evolve. The site told me what to do. On the west side of the house was a 250-foot-long east-facing slope that had been made even steeper by the initial grading for building. At its base I had a curved, four-foot, cream-colored stucco wall built to retain the soil and make a visual connection with the stucco house. This wall made a pale C-shaped gash in the landscape. The planting would have to stand up to this visually. The hillside was being eroded rapidly by thunderstorms and strong winds, and was also home to a zesty bunch of annual and biennial weeds. I decided this area needed my intervention first. It ran parallel with the main access route to the house from the stable, garage, and parking area, so I wanted it to be welcoming and appealing on an intimate level. To avoid blocking the view and in deference to the howling winds, I decided only low-growing plants could populate the hillside. These needed to knit the soil in place, remain evergreen for winter interest and continued erosion control, and look good from below. The site was not too hot—an east rather than south exposure—and wet in the spring but bone dry for much of the rest of the growing season.

I planted several dozen dwarf conifers, mainly pines and cultivars of Colorado spruce, as well as a number of common spreading junipers. These helped tie the hillside with the juniper- and pine-dotted chaparral beyond. A few other woody plants—prostrate forms of broom, plum, manzanita, and rose—went in. Then came hundreds of mat-forming Mediterranean and rock garden plants: sedums, ice plants, phloxes, veronicas, small geraniums and erodiums, alyssums, dianthus, hypericums, oreganoes, thymes, and savories. Small grasses and sedges helped keep the planting in harmony with the grassy slopes all around. I planted mostly two-and-a-half-inch pots—leftovers from specialty nurseries at the end of the season and seedlings I’d grown myself. A good third died the first winter, desiccated by winds in the autumn and unable to get their roots established. I learned not to plant anything small past early September. The following year I added thousands of bulbs, mainly scillas, puschkinias, muscari, chionodoxa, fritillaries, alliums, and cyclamineus daffodils. These took to the site quickly and continued to increase in number for several years until the three-year drought hit in 2000. Most of the hillside planting survived this misery, during which our well ran dry for four months during all three summers. The plants just did not grow much, or bloom well.

Unsung Grasses and Sedges

On the hunt for tough, clay-loving, hardy, and seasonally drought-tolerant grasses and sedges to help blend my garden into the native grassland already on the site and to celebrate the intense light and wind, I discovered many less common, unadulterated species deserving more garden use. Large, flashy, often variegated grasses, many of exotic provenance, have dominated the horticultural scene since grasses became popular a couple of decades ago. Here are some sturdier species that should share the limelight.—L.S.

Aristida purpurea/purple three-awn

Bouteloua gracilis/blue grama

Carex flacca/blue sedge

Carex muskingumensis/palm sedge

Festuca mairei/Atlas fescue

Sesleria autumnalis

Sporobolus heterolepis/praine dropseed

Sporobolus wrightii/giant sacaton

Stipa calamagrostis

Stipa comata/needle-and-thread grass

A FAILED EXPERIMENT

The drought was not nearly as kind to the courtyard garden. This was the only flat part of the site, on the north side of the house but in full sun, where water literally stood for several weeks during the early spring the first four years we lived there. I enclosed the area with a stucco wall, creating a frame to separate this planting from the rest of the garden. This worked on many levels, first and foremost as a firebreak. It also helped link the garden to the house, and created a sense of enclosure and privacy. Lastly, the walls helped set the area apart visually, to separate the plants that would live there from the much smaller, scruffier, wilder assortment that grew in the rest of the garden and in the natural areas beyond. A rustic pergola went into the center, and a raised path and platform of cedar for access and dining, to keep out of the muck in the spring. Here went plants that could take spring flooding and much drier conditions later in the season. We added 26 pickup-loads of rotted horse manure. Most of the plants had to be watered at least every 10 days throughout the growing season, because so few plants can tolerate such extremes in moisture availability. It became the highest maintenance area. A couple hundred camassias and 2,000 dependable large-flowered narcissus cultivars went in, along with many shrubs, a dozen small flowering trees, and lots of large grasses and perennials. After three years of drought, not much survived except the bulbs, a few lilacs, and a couple of crab apples. I was especially sad about a collection of 35 robust kniphofia species and hybrids. Only two remained.

Dependably self-sowing annuals, biennials, and short-lived perennials

Argemone polyanthemos/pricky poppy

Cleome serrulata/Rocky Mountain bee plant

Echium lusitanicum

Eryngium planum/sea holly

Eschscholzia californica/California poppy

Glaucium corniculatum, G. fibrilligerum, G. grandiflorum/horned poppy

Ipomopsis aggregata/scarlet gilia

Linum Iewisii/native blue flax

Papaver triniifolium/Armenian poppy

Tanacetum niveum/snow daisy

Verbascum undulatum/wavy-leaf mullein

THE DRY SOUTH GARDEN

The most successful area was the last one I planted, three years after I moved to the canyon. A friend and I had found a supplier who had boulders that matched the glacial rocks on the site exactly, the same sort of rounded, uncomplicated, gentle-looking lichen-encrusted “manatee” rocks, as I like to call them. We added a flatbed trailer’s worth more rocks to the steep gulch on the south side of the house. This area was to remain unirrigated and make use of many native plants and a few of the most drought-tolerant exotics I knew. It was the warmest spot on the site, out of the prevailing winds and in full sun at all times of the day and year. It connected two favorite hangouts along the gulch—a stone bench under a lone ponderosa pine with a great view of the canyon, and a firepit for barbecuing and partying into the night. With a host of grasses, yuccas, and a thicket of three-leaf sumac (Rhus trilobata) already there, I added many more yucca species along with hardy cacti, agaves, dasylirions, hesper-aloes, and nolinas, and just shy of 80 species of penstemons and eriogonums I had grown from seed. Some other tough exotics went in, including a litany of labiates—species of dracocephalum, nepeta, agastache, sideritis, teucrium, stachys, ballota, salvia, scutellaria, and marrubium. Thousands of crocus and tulip species went in—they could take the heat and drought, and the unamended baked clay prevented rodent damage that would occur on moister, amended parts of the site. My cats helped decimate the rodent and rabbit population over the first couple of seasons, which helped as well. The first spring after a late-summer planting, this garden exploded with all the quick-growing, showy penstemons.

Heroic Performers

After seven Job-like years of gardening, a group of tried-and-true plants remained steadfast through deluge, draught, wind, hail, record-breaking heat, and subzero winters. These became signature plants of the garden-I planted more, eager for dependable beauty. They shared the wild, natural look that I desire, and outstanding reliability. Some worked their way into my heart for their long season of appeal, while others earned my affection for just the opposite reason, for their seasonal moment of splendor, which, though fleeting, came faithfully and gave me much anticipatory pleasure. Listed below are some of my favorites from this stalwart group.–L.S.

The following year, 1999, we had 14 inches of rain in six weeks, and most of the penstemons rotted. The rest of the garden, however, continued to keep my spirits up through the ensuing three years of drought. Although little flowered, the textures and forms of the maturing succulents and airy grasses were my sanity while so many plants in other parts of the garden languished and died. Container plants also helped me through those hard years.

LESSONS LEARNED

I left this garden at the end of 2002 and moved back into town, to a flat half-acre with neighbors and basketball hoops rather than coyotes and rocks. I no longer fear wildfires or worry about bears and mountain lions, though deer pass through occasionally. The wind howls less, the weeds are fewer, and there is deep, fertile clay. I now have a city tap to water if I need to. My heart misses the wild, open beauty of the canyon; the practical side of me is relieved to be back in civilization. Liberty Hyde Bailey once said, “the best gardener is also the best naturalist.” My seven years gardening in the canyon brought me a lot closer to the true meaning of those wise words, and for that I am deeply grateful. H

Related Posts:

Call of the Wild

A Colorado garden shaped by the harsh hand of nature

text and photography by LAUREN SPRINGER

LIKE MANY TRANSPLANTS to the Rocky Mountain West, I came for the region’s natural beauty. In 1995, after six years in an unremarkable small plains town north of Denver, I had the privilege of moving to 115 acres of pristine foothills land west of Fort Collins. It was more stunning a place than I had ever imagined living in, but gardening there was far from ideal. With a short three-and-a-half-month frost-free season and low temperatures placing it squarely in USDA Zone 4b, the cruel facts were undeniable. Add to this incessant wind, inconsistent winter snowcover, with some of the heaviest snows coming as late as May and as early as September, and clearly I was in for a challenge.

It wasn’t all bad news, though. The land was quite steep—a desirable change for me—with spectacular views of the first row of foothills and a red sandstone canyon. There was actually more topsoil than typical for the area: between four and nine inches before hitting subsoil and bedrock. The soil itself was a seemingly intractable alkaline clay that became an ally during drought, holding what little moisture was available and growing the plants tight and tough. Large rounded granite glacial boulders abounded on the site, along with ponderosa pines, Rocky Mountain junipers, and well over 150 species of gardenworthy native shrubs, perennials, bulbs, succulents, grasses, and sedges. At 6,200 feet in elevation, with primarily southern and eastern exposures, an overlap of shortgrass prairie, foothills chaparral, and montane flora and fauna made for an uncharacteristically biodiverse spot.

I was truly blessed, because I have always gardened to be closer to nature. My joy comes from re-creating a bit of wildness in a heightened, exaggerated form. This allows me to experience the land’s natural rhythms, seasonal events and changes, as well as to enjoy plants in associations that mirror the beauty of their native haunts.

SETBACKS

My initial optimism was soon dampened by an overwhelming sense of awe for the beauty of what was already there. How could I ever create anything remotely as perfect? And how could I make my work fit in and look a part of the greater garden of Eden that lay all around me? Were it not for the immediacy of the scarred acre around the house caused by the building process, I might have remained immobilized. But erosion, encroaching weeds, and blowing dust all called me to arms. I had to plant something to heal the wounds. This one acre became a seven-year experiment from which I learned more about the joys and limitations of gardening in and with nature than I may ever be able to do again.

There were also practical obstacles. Before the first plant went in or the first stone was laid, I had hooved animals of all sorts to contend with. A resident herd of mule deer, the canyon’s seasonal cattle, and our own horses were all incompatible with plant life of the gardenesque sort. We put up a seven-and-a-half-foot tall New Zealand high-tension livestock fence, enclosing a bit over the acre I planned to garden around the house. Aside from keeping the larger herbivores at bay, it also provided security for children and pets after a serious wildfire, when bears and mountain lions came down close to our home in search of food.

CREATING SPACES

As with any private garden, how one experiences the spaces around the house determines how the garden should evolve. The site told me what to do. On the west side of the house was a 250-foot-long east-facing slope that had been made even steeper by the initial grading for building. At its base I had a curved, four-foot, cream-colored stucco wall built to retain the soil and make a visual connection with the stucco house. This wall made a pale C-shaped gash in the landscape. The planting would have to stand up to this visually. The hillside was being eroded rapidly by thunderstorms and strong winds, and was also home to a zesty bunch of annual and biennial weeds. I decided this area needed my intervention first. It ran parallel with the main access route to the house from the stable, garage, and parking area, so I wanted it to be welcoming and appealing on an intimate level. To avoid blocking the view and in deference to the howling winds, I decided only low-growing plants could populate the hillside. These needed to knit the soil in place, remain evergreen for winter interest and continued erosion control, and look good from below. The site was not too hot—an east rather than south exposure—and wet in the spring but bone dry for much of the rest of the growing season.

I planted several dozen dwarf conifers, mainly pines and cultivars of Colorado spruce, as well as a number of common spreading junipers. These helped tie the hillside with the juniper- and pine-dotted chaparral beyond. A few other woody plants—prostrate forms of broom, plum, manzanita, and rose—went in. Then came hundreds of mat-forming Mediterranean and rock garden plants: sedums, ice plants, phloxes, veronicas, small geraniums and erodiums, alyssums, dianthus, hypericums, oreganoes, thymes, and savories. Small grasses and sedges helped keep the planting in harmony with the grassy slopes all around. I planted mostly two-and-a-half-inch pots—leftovers from specialty nurseries at the end of the season and seedlings I’d grown myself. A good third died the first winter, desiccated by winds in the autumn and unable to get their roots established. I learned not to plant anything small past early September. The following year I added thousands of bulbs, mainly scillas, puschkinias, muscari, chionodoxa, fritillaries, alliums, and cyclamineus daffodils. These took to the site quickly and continued to increase in number for several years until the three-year drought hit in 2000. Most of the hillside planting survived this misery, during which our well ran dry for four months during all three summers. The plants just did not grow much, or bloom well.

Unsung Grasses and Sedges

On the hunt for tough, clay-loving, hardy, and seasonally drought-tolerant grasses and sedges to help blend my garden into the native grassland already on the site and to celebrate the intense light and wind, I discovered many less common, unadulterated species deserving more garden use. Large, flashy, often variegated grasses, many of exotic provenance, have dominated the horticultural scene since grasses became popular a couple of decades ago. Here are some sturdier species that should share the limelight.—L.S.

Aristida purpurea/purple three-awn

Bouteloua gracilis/blue grama

Carex flacca/blue sedge

Carex muskingumensis/palm sedge

Festuca mairei/Atlas fescue

Sesleria autumnalis

Sporobolus heterolepis/praine dropseed

Sporobolus wrightii/giant sacaton

Stipa calamagrostis

Stipa comata/needle-and-thread grass

A FAILED EXPERIMENT

The drought was not nearly as kind to the courtyard garden. This was the only flat part of the site, on the north side of the house but in full sun, where water literally stood for several weeks during the early spring the first four years we lived there. I enclosed the area with a stucco wall, creating a frame to separate this planting from the rest of the garden. This worked on many levels, first and foremost as a firebreak. It also helped link the garden to the house, and created a sense of enclosure and privacy. Lastly, the walls helped set the area apart visually, to separate the plants that would live there from the much smaller, scruffier, wilder assortment that grew in the rest of the garden and in the natural areas beyond. A rustic pergola went into the center, and a raised path and platform of cedar for access and dining, to keep out of the muck in the spring. Here went plants that could take spring flooding and much drier conditions later in the season. We added 26 pickup-loads of rotted horse manure. Most of the plants had to be watered at least every 10 days throughout the growing season, because so few plants can tolerate such extremes in moisture availability. It became the highest maintenance area. A couple hundred camassias and 2,000 dependable large-flowered narcissus cultivars went in, along with many shrubs, a dozen small flowering trees, and lots of large grasses and perennials. After three years of drought, not much survived except the bulbs, a few lilacs, and a couple of crab apples. I was especially sad about a collection of 35 robust kniphofia species and hybrids. Only two remained.

Dependably self-sowing annuals, biennials, and short-lived perennials

Argemone polyanthemos/pricky poppy

Cleome serrulata/Rocky Mountain bee plant

Echium lusitanicum

Eryngium planum/sea holly

Eschscholzia californica/California poppy

Glaucium corniculatum, G. fibrilligerum, G. grandiflorum/horned poppy

Ipomopsis aggregata/scarlet gilia

Linum Iewisii/native blue flax

Papaver triniifolium/Armenian poppy

Tanacetum niveum/snow daisy

Verbascum undulatum/wavy-leaf mullein

THE DRY SOUTH GARDEN

The most successful area was the last one I planted, three years after I moved to the canyon. A friend and I had found a supplier who had boulders that matched the glacial rocks on the site exactly, the same sort of rounded, uncomplicated, gentle-looking lichen-encrusted “manatee” rocks, as I like to call them. We added a flatbed trailer’s worth more rocks to the steep gulch on the south side of the house. This area was to remain unirrigated and make use of many native plants and a few of the most drought-tolerant exotics I knew. It was the warmest spot on the site, out of the prevailing winds and in full sun at all times of the day and year. It connected two favorite hangouts along the gulch—a stone bench under a lone ponderosa pine with a great view of the canyon, and a firepit for barbecuing and partying into the night. With a host of grasses, yuccas, and a thicket of three-leaf sumac (Rhus trilobata) already there, I added many more yucca species along with hardy cacti, agaves, dasylirions, hesper-aloes, and nolinas, and just shy of 80 species of penstemons and eriogonums I had grown from seed. Some other tough exotics went in, including a litany of labiates—species of dracocephalum, nepeta, agastache, sideritis, teucrium, stachys, ballota, salvia, scutellaria, and marrubium. Thousands of crocus and tulip species went in—they could take the heat and drought, and the unamended baked clay prevented rodent damage that would occur on moister, amended parts of the site. My cats helped decimate the rodent and rabbit population over the first couple of seasons, which helped as well. The first spring after a late-summer planting, this garden exploded with all the quick-growing, showy penstemons.

Heroic Performers

After seven Job-like years of gardening, a group of tried-and-true plants remained steadfast through deluge, draught, wind, hail, record-breaking heat, and subzero winters. These became signature plants of the garden-I planted more, eager for dependable beauty. They shared the wild, natural look that I desire, and outstanding reliability. Some worked their way into my heart for their long season of appeal, while others earned my affection for just the opposite reason, for their seasonal moment of splendor, which, though fleeting, came faithfully and gave me much anticipatory pleasure. Listed below are some of my favorites from this stalwart group.–L.S.

The following year, 1999, we had 14 inches of rain in six weeks, and most of the penstemons rotted. The rest of the garden, however, continued to keep my spirits up through the ensuing three years of drought. Although little flowered, the textures and forms of the maturing succulents and airy grasses were my sanity while so many plants in other parts of the garden languished and died. Container plants also helped me through those hard years.

LESSONS LEARNED

I left this garden at the end of 2002 and moved back into town, to a flat half-acre with neighbors and basketball hoops rather than coyotes and rocks. I no longer fear wildfires or worry about bears and mountain lions, though deer pass through occasionally. The wind howls less, the weeds are fewer, and there is deep, fertile clay. I now have a city tap to water if I need to. My heart misses the wild, open beauty of the canyon; the practical side of me is relieved to be back in civilization. Liberty Hyde Bailey once said, “the best gardener is also the best naturalist.” My seven years gardening in the canyon brought me a lot closer to the true meaning of those wise words, and for that I am deeply grateful. H